WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites
- ISBN13: 9780470554586
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Don’t let WordPress intimidate you. WordPress 24-Hour Trainer is a unique lesson-based book that walks you through the essential parts of WordPress. Each lesson is streamlined to teach a specific aspect of WordPress, he… More >>
WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites
When I say I’m new to WordPress, it’s as if I’d been wrapped in cellophane, lying in a cardboard box, like a new item on a shelf. I only wish i’d found this book first but I don’t think it was on the market yet. It’s the only book a beginner needs. Each chapter is like a little classroom where you learn a specific lesson. At the end of each chapter (or lesson) the author gives you supervised practice with step-by-step instruction. It’s wonderful. He doesn’t talk down to you ( although my ego could take that because of my zero level of knowledge) nor does he reach to a level far above the average person’s head. I felt completely at ease with every chapter.
For instance, I like to do videos but I was always having trouble. The author explained so simply why mine didn’t have controls when embeded directly. I was trying to put the round pegs in the square holes again. The whole book just made everything easier for me to understand.
The absolute zenith is a DVD that was included. It goes through each chapter showing all the boxes that you’ll be working with. To me, it was as if a little bit of WordPress information heaven dropped into my laptop. Now, I’m positive not everyone begins blogging at the lowly level that I started with. Even if you have your blog up and going with WP, I’m sure you’ll be amazed at the new gems of information you will find. I don’t know how anyone can understand on their own, all the reasons behind the working of WP and this book clearly defines them all.
I bought a lot of books before I came upon this one. I gleaned a bit of fragmented information here and there and spent a lot of money. Don’t let the price on this book scare you away. $44.99 sounds a little pricey for a book BUT it’s well worth it. I wasted many times that price before I found this book. Here’s the good news. You can buy the book on Amazon for $29.69.
Rating: 5 / 5
George Plumley, WordPress 24 Hour Trainer (Wiley, 2010)
WordPress has, over the last few years, become one of the dominant forces in blogging software, to the point where users are stretching it beyond its blogging roots and using it for general website design. As such, since 2008, there’s been a raft of WordPress books flooding the market. As I write this, George Plumley’s WordPress 24 Hour Trainer is the latest, but give it five minutes and another dozen will come down the pike. And therein lies the challenge of writing a WordPress book: what can you do that will make you stand out from the crowd? Most authors specialize in one piece of WordPress (you can find an almost endless number of books on theme design, for example), but Plumley takes a more holistic beginners’ approach: how to do everything shallowly, with easy step-by-step instructions. As such, it’s a solid reference for anyone who’s just starting out with WordPress. I’m sure there are those who will quibble with not enough depth in topic A or a different way to do topic B that Plumley didn’t cover, but again, this is an overview. The flip side of that coin is the book’s price, which seems way, way over the top for a beginners’ overview. WordPress for Dummies can be had, if you compare both at full MSRP, for just over half as much as this book. Because of this, I’m reserved at giving it an outright recommendation, but if you’ve got the cash to spare, it’s worth your time. ***
Rating: 3 / 5
The author notes the book is for “those who’ve never built a website and those who’ve never built a WordPress website”. I am of the latter group and found this a great book to clue me in on what I should know about WordPress. I picked up some good tips that I have started to utilize – I was particularly interested in search engine optimization. The book is laid out well, easy to read, and includes helpful images. The book covers more than I would have thought to look into as a relative beginner, so I’m really glad I had this to point everything out.
The one thing I was slightly disappointed in was that some topics were more or less a “go here for this plug-in” sort of deal with not a lot of additional information to explain how to work with the plug-in. I understand that is not necessarily the purpose of the book, and if the additional information were included every time, the book would have to be longer, etc, but it is something I wished were included. Expect to add more time on top of learning WordPress from this book to learning how to work with a few of the plug-ins on your own time through independent research.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is clear and helpful if you know little about WordPress and using a CMS. It would have value as a reference book and a point of orientation for people starting out in WordPress (.org)
Still, the best way to learn WP is hands-on, and much of this material is easy to learn on your own or via WordPress’ text and video tutorials. The “24 Hours” spent reading this book would be better spent learning by doing. If that’s too daunting, WordPress might not be the right platform for you anyway.
WordPress (.org) has come a long way in ease of usability, but if you want more out of your blog than just being a journal, things can get confusing and frustrating pretty quickly — see plugin conflicts, video in sidebars, canonical issues …
The more complicated aspects of WP, such as working with PHP, CSS, javascript and hand-editing site elements such as headers and nav bars, aren’t within the book’s scope — I’d think these topics would be helpful in the latter part of a book such as this.
Some of the information in the book seemed dubious, such as the section on SEO. Most of it was on target, though, and the author has a gift for explaining things.
As a confident but far from ace user, I did learn a few things, but not much.
Rating: 3 / 5
If you are new to WordPress, you certainly could do worse in your choice of books. I have been using WordPress for several years and this is one of the better books I’ve seen on using WordPress. Even as an experienced user, I found some tidbits in here that were helpful. But as a new user to WordPress, you should also be aware of the fact that WordPress is under constant development and consequently upgrades are fast and furious. This is a good thing to the WordPress power user, but to authors and publishers must be a pretty big issue since any book released soon becomes outdated due to the relentless march forward of WordPress development. As I write this review WordPress is already at version 2.9.2 and version 3.0 is right around the corner. Unfortunately this book is written with version 2.8 in mind so it won’t even mention many of the new features introduced with version 2.9.* of WordPress. However there is still a great amount of useful information presented in these chapters that will pertain to WordPress 2.9.*, but just be aware that WordPress is quickly marching forward so this book will become less useful as time goes on.
The author is gifted with an excellent style of writing. He presents his material in a very easy to read manner while avoiding being too chummy or too technical. Each chapter has exercises and if you complete the exercises, you will learn a great deal and gain hands-on experience. The book takes a fairly straightforward approach that a beginner will appreciate. The process of installing WordPress is discussed as well as a good explanation of the Dashboard and how to move around in the Admin area.
A few quibbles such as in Lesson 8 the author discusses Blockquotes, what they are used for and how some WordPress themes style them in different ways. He then shows a graphic of 4 different and attractive ways that Blockquotes can be styled. He neglects however to tell you how you can actually change the styling of your Blockquotes, probably because it involves modifying the cascading style sheet which he may have felt was beyond the scope of a beginner book. But he could of at least mentioned that instead of ignoring the issue completely. He also fails to discuss the Search Engine Optimization ramifications of using Headings properly.
One area of the book really disappoints, and that is Part X: Extending WordPress. Although not necessarily the fault of the author since his book was written with WordPress v2.8 in mind, I found that several of the plugins mentioned in Part X were not compatible with the latest version of WordPress due to the fact that the plugin authors had not yet updated their plugins to work with the latest version of WordPress. Perhaps they worked with v2.8 of WordPress, but they did not work with 2.9.2 at the time I am writing my review.
Overall though, this is a solid book on WordPress for the beginner to intermediate user.
Rating: 4 / 5